Watzke once thought of Tuchel for Germany: the real shock lies elsewhere

On the night of 11 April 2026, the Borussia Dortmund team bus had barely left the hotel when three bombs went off along its side. Marc Bartra was sitting by the window; his wrist was broken, blood soaking into the seat. The Champions League quarter-final against AS Monaco was pushed back a day, and Dortmund lost 2-3 at home. Signal Iduna Park was still full. The stands still sang. But when the ball rolled, I was sitting in front of a screen in Osaka at three in the morning, understanding that what I was watching was no longer football. It was a group of people trying to look normal. Nine years later, Hans-Joachim Watzke sat in a Sky studio for the programme Meine Geschichte and told the old story. He said he had once had the idea of putting Thomas Tuchel in charge of the Germany national team. Goal.com ran the headline "Completely surprising statements!" The genuinely surprising part is elsewhere, and it has nothing to do with Tuchel. Watzke is not an outsider. He ran Dortmund for more than two decades as chief executive — signing contracts, selling players, carrying the profit-and-loss responsibility. Since January 2026 he has served as a vice-president of the German football federation, a shift from club budgets to federation governance. The man who held appointment authority for the national coach at the time was Oliver Bierhoff as sporting director. Rudi Völler later took over that role. The state of the German team was nothing to be proud of. Germany went out in the group stage at the 2026 World Cup and repeated exactly that at Qatar 2026. Watzke called the matches after Qatar under Hansi Flick "a disaster". That same Flick now manages Barcelona and forces people to ask again whether the problem was the coach or the environment around him. At 53, Tuchel sits in the England job and imposes maximum pressure on himself. The distinction that matters: Watzke said he had an idea, not that he pursued it. He also said plainly that who becomes Germany coach is not his decision. Put those two sentences side by side and the sensational headline collapses. A passing thought in a vice-president's head is not a proposal, still less a decision. What is more interesting is the federation's default mechanism: when nobody actively pushes an alternative, the incumbent stays. Watzke recalled that the prevailing view at the time was to carry on with Flick. The real value sits in the 2026 wound. Watzke called Tuchel's public handling of the return-to-play decision the biggest human disappointment of his career. He stressed it twice, flatly. The mechanism of that rupture was not technical. It was internal business going outside and coming back distorted. In this trade, trust between the boardroom and the dressing room is thin as tissue paper. Once it tears, no tactical diagram sews it back. Who decided that night should be stated clearly. According to the account in the article, the players discussed among themselves whether to play — it was not the coach declaring on their behalf. Marcel Schmelzer and Nuri Sahin, two senior figures, both later said they could not spare a thought for football at the time. That testimony matches the dressing-room side and diverges from how the story was first told. This is what I always watch in any internal dispute: who tells it, to whom, and when. But the story does not end there. Watzke says the two men now talk properly, and that forgiving took no effort at all. He even told the English federation that Tuchel can do this job almost blind. A man who was personally hurt still separates his own feeling from his assessment of ability. Few people manage that distinction, and it deserves more credit than any sensational headline. I could be wrong, and I will name where. First, the timeline in the report has holes. Tuchel going to England and Watzke reportedly being decisive in installing Jurgen Klopp after the 2026 World Cup sit in unverified territory. A vice-president who says he has no decision authority and is simultaneously described as the decisive figure means at least one of those details is wrong. It could be an editing error; it could also be that his authority changed over time. Second, the reconciliation may be image management. When a man approaching the end of his career tells his life story on television, he is drafting his own history. I have seen this in the trade: people do not lie, they choose the order of telling. "Forgiving took no effort" sounds lovely, but it still stands beside "the biggest human disappointment", and those two sentences do not cancel each other out. They coexist. Look closely: Watzke never retracted the second half. Third, and this is the part that bothers me most: mining a bombing for television content deserves a second thought. I understand the news value. Some wounds should not be reopened just to add another loop to the cycle. At the moment my colleagues left me behind, I learned to read people faster than I read tactics. When I get burned, I do not hunt the arsonist. I go looking for the next fire — that is how football people survive. Watzke and Tuchel walked exactly that road, except they came back and talked it through at the end. A verifiable prediction: the first time Tuchel's England hits a bad run, this interview will be dug up and framed as "what if Germany had chosen Tuchel back then". Watch two other signals: official German federation statements about the head-coach position after the 2026 cycle, and whether Watzke still invokes "it wasn't my decision". If he stops saying it, his authority has shifted, and this interview becomes a document rather than a story.